Translation plane explained

In mathematics, a translation plane is a projective plane which admits a certain group of symmetries (described below). Along with the Hughes planes and the Figueroa planes, translation planes are among the most well-studied of the known non-Desarguesian planes, and the vast majority of known non-Desarguesian planes are either translation planes, or can be obtained from a translation plane via successive iterations of dualization and/or derivation.^[1]

In a projective plane, let represent a point, and represent a line. A central collineation with center and axis is a collineation fixing every point on and every line through . It is called an elation if is on, otherwise it is called a homology. The central collineations with center and axis form a group.^[2] A line in a projective plane is a translation line if the group of all elations with axis acts transitively on the points of the affine plane obtained by removing from the plane, (the affine derivative of). A projective plane with a translation line is called a translation plane.

The affine plane obtained by removing the translation line is called an affine translation plane. While it is often easier to work with projective planes, in this context several authors use the term translation plane to mean affine translation plane.

Algebraic construction with coordinates

Every projective plane can be coordinatized by at least one planar ternary ring. For translation planes, it is always possible to coordinatize with a quasifield.^[3] However, some quasifields satisfy additional algebraic properties, and the corresponding planar ternary rings coordinatize translation planes which admit additional symmetries. Some of these special classes are:

• Nearfield planes - coordinatized by nearfields.
• Semifield planes - coordinatized by semifields, semifield planes have the property that their dual is also a translation plane.
• Moufang planes - coordinatized by alternative division rings, Moufang planes are exactly those translation planes that have at least two translation lines. Every finite Moufang plane is Desarguesian and every Desarguesian plane is a Moufang plane, but there are infinite Moufang planes that are not Desarguesian (such as the Cayley plane).

Given a quasifield with operations + (addition) and

⋅ (multiplication), one can define a planar ternary ring to create coordinates for a translation plane. However, it is more typical to create an affine plane directly from the quasifield by defining the points as pairs (a,b) where a and b are elements of the quasifield, and the lines are the sets of points (x,y) satisfying an equation of the form y = m ⋅ x + b , as m and b vary over the elements of the quasifield, together with the sets of points (x,y) satisfying an equation of the form x = a , as a varies over the elements of the quasifield.^[4]

Geometric construction with spreads (Bruck/Bose)

Translation planes are related to spreads of odd-dimensional projective spaces by the Bruck-Bose construction. A spread of, where

n \geq 1 is an integer and a division ring, is a partition of the space into pairwise disjoint -dimensional subspaces. In the finite case, a spread of is a set of -dimensional subspaces, with no two intersecting.

Given a spread of, the Bruck-Bose construction produces a translation plane as follows: Embed as a hyperplane

\Sigma of . Define an incidence structure with "points," the points of not on \Sigma and "lines" the -dimensional subspaces of meeting \Sigma in an element of . Then is an affine translation plane. In the finite case, this procedure produces a translation plane of order .

The converse of this statement is almost always true. Any translation plane which is coordinatized by a quasifield that is finite-dimensional over its kernel (is necessarily a division ring) can be generated from a spread of using the Bruck-Bose construction, where is the dimension of the quasifield, considered as a module over its kernel. An instant corollary of this result is that every finite translation plane can be obtained from this construction.

Algebraic construction with spreads (André)

André gave an earlier algebraic representation of (affine) translation planes that is fundamentally the same as Bruck/Bose. Let be a -dimensional vector space over a field . A spread of is a set of -dimensional subspaces of that partition the non-zero vectors of . The members of are called the components of the spread and if and are distinct components then . Let be the incidence structure whose points are the vectors of and whose lines are the cosets of components, that is, sets of the form where is a vector of and is a component of the spread . Then:

is an affine plane and the group of translations for in is an automorphism group acting regularly on the points of this plane.

The finite case

Let, the finite field of order and the -dimensional vector space over represented as:

V = \{ (x,y) \colon x, y \in F ^{n} \}. Let be matrices over with the property that is nonsingular whenever . For define,V _{i} = \{(x, xM _{i)} \colon x \in F ^{n} \}, usually referred to as the subspaces "". Also define:V _{q ^{n}} = \{ ( 0 ,y) \colon y \in F ^{n} \}, the subspace "".

The set is a spread of .The set of matrices used in this construction is called a spread set, and this set of matrices can be used directly in the projective space

PG( 2 n -1 ,q) to create a spread in the geometric sense.

Reguli and regular spreads

Let

\Sigma be the projective space for n \geq 1 an integer, and a division ring. A regulus^[5] in \Sigma is a collection of pairwise disjoint -dimensional subspaces with the following properties:

1. contains at least 3 elements
2. Every line meeting three elements of, called a transversal, meets every element of
3. Every point of a transversal to lies on some element of

Any three pairwise disjoint -dimensional subspaces in

\Sigma lie in a unique regulus. A spread of \Sigma is regular if for any three distinct -dimensional subspaces of, all the members of the unique regulus determined by them are contained in . For any division ring with more than 2 elements, if a spread of is regular, then the translation plane created by that spread via the André/Bruck-Bose construction is a Moufang plane. A slightly weaker converse holds: if a translation plane is Pappian, then it can be generated via the André/Bruck-Bose construction from a regular spread.

In the finite case, must be a field of order

q > 2 , and the classes of Moufang, Desarguesian and Pappian planes are all identical, so this theorem can be refined to state that a spread of is regular if and only if the translation plane created by that spread via the André/Bruck-Bose construction is Desarguesian.

In the case where is the field

GF( 2 ) , all spreads of are trivially regular, since a regulus only contains three elements. While the only translation plane of order 8 is Desarguesian, there are known to be non-Desarguesian translation planes of order for every integer e \geq 4 .

Families of non-Desarguesian translation planes

• Hall planes - constructed via Bruck/Bose from a regular spread of

PG( 3 ,q) where one regulus has been replaced by the set of transversal lines to that regulus (called the opposite regulus).

• Subregular planes - constructed via Bruck/Bose from a regular spread of

PG( 3 ,q) where a set of pairwise disjoint reguli have been replaced by their opposite reguli.

• André planes
• Nearfield planes
• Semifield planes

Finite translation planes of small order

It is well known that the only projective planes of order 8 or less are Desarguesian, and there are no known non-Desarguesian planes of prime order.^[6] Finite translation planes must have prime power order. There are four projective planes of order 9, of which two are translation planes: the Desarguesian plane, and the Hall plane. The following table details the current state of knowledge:

!Order!Number of Non-DesarguesianTranslation Planes

9	1
16	7^[7]
25	20^[8]
27	6^[9]
32	≥8^[10]
49	1346^[11]
64	≥2833^[12]

References

• • • • • • Czerwinski. Terry. Oakden. David. 1992. The translation planes of order twenty-five. Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series A. en. 59. 2. 193–217. 10.1016/0097-3165(92)90065-3.
  • Dempwolff. U.. 1994. Translation planes of order 27. Designs, Codes and Cryptography. en. 4. 2. 105–121. 10.1007/BF01578865. 12524473. 0925-1022.
• Dover. Jeremy M.. 2019-02-27. A genealogy of the translation planes of order 25. math.CO. 1902.07838.
  • • • • • Mathon. Rudolf. Royle. Gordon F.. 1995. The translation planes of order 49. Designs, Codes and Cryptography. en. 5. 1. 57–72. 10.1007/BF01388504. 1925628. 0925-1022.
• McKay. Brendan D.. Royle. Gordon F.. 2014. There are 2834 spreads of lines in PG(3,8). math.CO. 1404.1643.
  • Reifart. Arthur. 1984. The classification of the translation planes of order 16, II. Geometriae Dedicata. en. 17. 1. 10.1007/BF00181513. 121935740. 0046-5755.

Further reading

• Mauro Biliotti, Vikram Jha, Norman L. Johnson (2001) Foundations of Translation Planes, Marcel Dekker .

External links

• Lecture Notes on Projective Geometry
• Publications of Keith Mellinger

Notes and References

1. Eric Moorhouse has performed extensive computer searches to find projective planes. For order 25, Moorhouse has found 193 projective planes, 180 of which can be obtained from a translation plane by iterated derivation and/or dualization. For order 49, the known 1349 translation planes give rise to more than 309,000 planes obtainable from this procedure.
2. Geometry Translation Plane Retrieved on June 13, 2007
3. There are many ways to coordinatize a translation plane which do not yield a quasifield, since the planar ternary ring depends on the quadrangle on which one chooses to base the coordinates. However, for translation planes there is always some coordinatization which yields a quasifield.
4. . Note that quasifields are technically either left or right quasifields, depending on whether multiplication distributes from the left or from the right (semifields satisfy both distributive laws). The definition of a quasifield in Wikipedia is a left quasifield, while Dembowski uses right quasifields. Generally this distinction is elided, since using a chirally "wrong" quasifield simply produces the dual of the translation plane.
5. This notion generalizes that of a classical regulus, which is one of the two families of ruling lines on a hyperboloid of one sheet in 3-dimensional space
6. Web site: Projective Planes of Small Order. 2020-11-08. ericmoorhouse.org.
7. Web site: Projective Planes of Order 16. 2020-11-08. ericmoorhouse.org.
8. Web site: Projective Planes of Order 25. 2020-11-08. ericmoorhouse.org.
9. Web site: Projective Planes of Order 27. 2020-11-08. ericmoorhouse.org.
10. Web site: Projective Planes of Order 32. 2020-11-08. ericmoorhouse.org.
11. Web site: Projective Planes of Order 49. 2020-11-08. ericmoorhouse.org.
12. . This is a complete count of the 2-dimensional non-Desarguesian translation planes; many higher-dimensional planes are known to exist.